Military Spending Isn't National Security

A surplus margin of military superiority does not buy increased national security, says Paul Pillar, director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.

28 November, 2010

As the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform goes about its business of searching for coins in the national sofa and other ways of making budgetary ends meet, I hope that the commission and those who will take action on its work will heed a letter delivered to it last week and signed by 48 scholars and practitioners of national security policy, myself included. The subject is military spending, and the need to reduce it. One can find elsewhere many specific ideas for savings in the defense budget; Benjamin Friedman (who also signed the letter) has offered some such ideas in these spaces.